Hearts & minds, cont’d.

You either followed the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure last week or you didn’t, so attempting a rehash of what happened at Washington’s National Press Club in this small space would be like trying to cram an orca into a Mason jar. And considering how De Void managed only a cursory scan of events from afar, a decent analysis is implausible.

“You had people who very explicitly had knowledge and who were afraid to speak up, so that you had some indication that this evidence had become suppressed in ways that are very disturbing.” — Dr. Edgar Cahn/CREDIT: nesta.org.uk

But one especially noteworthy blurb lit De Void’s radar screen and it concerned neither the witnesses nor the six retired politicians who listened to their testimony in a congressional inquiry-style format. This was Alejandro Rojas’ Open Minds Magazine interview with law professor emeritus Edgar Cahn, who told Rojas that what he heard last Friday was “very compelling, very exciting,” and “very disturbing,” especially regarding the implications of hoarding technology leads that could theoretically create a “sustainable planet.”

What most intrigued De Void were the Yale-educated Cahn’s credentials, which include the authorship of a 1968 study called Hunger, USA. Special counsel to and speechwriter for Attorney General Robert Kennedy and a distinguished scholar at the London School for Economics, Cahn went on to develop the Time Dollars project, a tax-exempt, service-credit currency program that serves poor communities in the U.S. and more than two dozen countries abroad.

De Void contacted Cahn on a followup phoner to see if the old civil rights attorney was having any second thoughts about supporting a United Nations-sponsored inquiry into The Great Taboo, as well as pressuring Congress to launch its own formal investigation. Cahn, who had no prior interest in UFOs and attended Friday’s session at the invitation of a friend, brushed off the notion he might get cold feet.

“I was one of the first people to do any research on hunger in America at a time when everybody denied its existence,” he said. “The only studies that had been done were by vitamin companies on the affluent; they said there might be some vitamin deficiencies here and there, but there was no indication of the magnitude and distribution of malnutrition in this country.”

Underwritten with foundation resources, Cahn’s year-long Hunger, USA study “at the very least shifted the burden of proof to the government to defend its position,” he recalls. “I even debated the Secretary of Agriculture who said there was no hunger in America. I had to tell him there are no newborn babies who can eat peanut butter.”

Given how last week’s UFO hearing was his first exposure to the issue, and given the “obvious” questions raised by a multinational cast of witnesses whose credentials impressed him, Cahn had a flashback to Official America’s initial resistance to the existence of malnutrition in the world’s richest nation. As with today, the media voiced plenty of skepticism — but with one significant distinction.

“There was sort of a disbelief in the media back then,” Cahn says. “You had to almost make it political battle, with an enemy, and in this case we were going against congressional districts where farmers were getting paid subsidies not to grow certain things. That got their attention.

“So it’s one thing for them to say, ‘We don’t know.’ But it’s another thing entirely for the media not to demand transparency from its government and to ridicule what it doesn’t know. If a politician charges taxicab fare for a pleasure trip, investigative reporters will be all over the case. But with such a massive amount of material on UFOs, with such cumulative experiences, they’re not willing to suspend disbelief? You almost need an investigation into why this is. I don’t think there’s a conspiracy involved, but more of a fear of looking foolish.”

Cahn says dedicated transparency advocates should collaborate with foundations or academic institutions to fund a commission to “challenge the executive branch for withholding information in the public interest,” he says. “That goes to the separation of powers, and Congress has an obligation to obtain that information. I’d go to a state where there have been numerous sightings, gather about 200, 300 people who’ve seen these things, and get them to gang up on their congressmen or senators as constituents who vote.

“You can also get a lot of energy from teenagers. I’d find a way to teenagers involved, because teenagers can be persistent and they don’t shut up and they should demand to know what’s going on in our universe.” At age 78, Cahn sounds like he’s ready for another campaign. Having his intelligence insulted by institutional indifference — media and otherwise — really puts the fire in him. “I’ve been in the trenches for awhile,” he says, “and I’m not afraid to get back in.”